Location: They say that time heals all things, they say you can always forget; But the smiles and tears across the years, they twist my heartstrings yet!

Posts: 4,792

Re: How can you be proud of something you were born with?

Quote:

Originally Posted by adopted_fatty_no_parents

You did not earn your whiteness, so how can you justify being proud of it? It's about as irrational as nationalism and fundamentalism. You did not contribute to the achievements of past whites, so how can you claim you deserve to be associated with them? I honestly have yet to find a rational answer to this question.

American whites have one common core characteristic that is so simplistic, my lethargic obese inquirer, that even you can understand it; and that is we all possess a unique gene that transformed us, not into immigrants escaping taxation or religious intolerance, but pioneers who uprooted their families in noble exploration of the unknowns, regardless of the hardships and perils to be endured.

Can you conceive of, with that walnut sized brain of yours, the grit, spirit and determination our forebears possessed while crossing the unfathomable ocean, in not exactly state of the line ships, on epic journeys of 6 months or more at Sea? We are their progeny and within us lies a long dormant seed that will blossom and come to fruition again.

Will you reply? Will you?

__________________

Cogito ergo sum

"Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation." - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

"There is no matter as such! All matter originates and exists, only by virtue of a force which brings the particles of an atom to vibration... We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter." - Max Planck, Nobel Physicist

Most people who are white are not so fortunate. They are simple folks and their family have never done anything. Watch most shows on TV about some celebrity's ancestry and you will see all of the people interviewed had peasants or prostitutes or bakers etc in their family.

This is actually incorrect. You only have to go back 20 or 22 generations at which point you are likely related to everyone in a region. At that point the number of great grandparents outnumbers the population of the region before accounting for overlap. The nobles also tended to spread their genes around.

is that why everyone is so hateful and jealous? you think we didn't earn our genetics? i'm damn proud of what i am, and my children, and my parents, etc, etc. if you had a little more ACTUAL pride you might catch up some day. not holding my breath though.

You did not earn your whiteness, so how can you justify being proud of it? It's about as irrational as nationalism and fundamentalism. You did not contribute to the achievements of past whites, so how can you claim you deserve to be associated with them? I honestly have yet to find a rational answer to this question.

Note that I think it applies to ALL ethnic groups, not just whites. But whites tend to be the most likely to be supremacist and besides this is a white forum, or so it seems.

Suspect this is a troll post because of your name.

Anyway, however you got good quality Q, if it is a quality of yourself you can be proud of it.

That's meant to exclude things like having a fancy car (which you could have obtained through theft, generating a problem for my analysis), which means I'm packing a lot into the constraint of "a quality about yourself" contra a "quality about what non-personal qualities you possess" (such as goods or social privileges) -- basically, I mean something about your person; your mind and body.

There's a lot of background assumptions I bring to that, like that if you make a nice painting there is an important personal growth as part of the process and that that's what you can be proud of, not the resulting artifact as such.

I'm a philosophical naturalist without being a materialist. I'm actually fairly strongly anti-materialist. I don't think the goal of life is to collect a lot of nice things. I would see the painting as valuable for the experience it gave you, the experience it gives you to view it with the knowledge you made it, the experience it gives others to view it, and the experience it gives you to know you benefited the others who saw it. The painting as a material object I think is just a sort of collection of molecules; it is the information carried by the molecules while they are in the form of the painting that is important.

This is derivative of "process philosophy" which was the perspective of a philosopher called Hegel.

is that why everyone is so hateful and jealous? you think we didn't earn our genetics? i'm damn proud of what i am, and my children, and my parents, etc, etc. if you had a little more ACTUAL pride you might catch up some day. not holding my breath though.

Really good point: actually your whole family line earned your genetics by surviving with it. You are part of that.

The radical individualism which has people ignoring group level entities and phenomena is a really recent ideological development and no more automatically true than any other proposition. It's just very common in the culture, is all, so many people don't even think of questioning it.

Also thinking The exception to the general rule about how a genetic quality is due to the efforts of a whole family line might be a case where there is a mutation, either for good or ill, or when there is a circumstance which allows, in the short term, biological rewards for evolution on a trajectory which threatens other aspects of how a given life form evolved to survive.

In the case of a mutation that is good, you be grateful to Eris if not your family line; for one which is harmful you can curse Eris if not your family line.

Getting onto a tangent, but for the case of short-term corruptions enabling bad qualities to spread in a population, all I can offer is the Confucian saying that in a country well-run it is a shame to be poor, but in a country badly run it is a shame to be wealthy.

Main point being that some things are better blamed on the the larger environmental circumstances than on the genes alone. Still I suspect there's always a price to pay, now or later (dumbing down your gene pool because of an economic corruption, for example, will ultimately pay back the whole society negatively).

This is just another one of our opposition's idiotic and irrational mantras like "we all bleed red". Yeah, well, so do dogs, cats and all types of mammals and animals.

I've got many skills that I wasn't born with that I'm proud of. I've got many traits that I had to work on and build --not born with-- that I'm proud of as well. Lots of things I wasn't born with that I'm proud of.

EVERYONE is proud of things they weren't born with, including our idiotic opposition and enemies.

You did not earn your whiteness, so how can you justify being proud of it? It's about as irrational as nationalism and fundamentalism. You did not contribute to the achievements of past whites, so how can you claim you deserve to be associated with them? I honestly have yet to find a rational answer to this question.

Note that I think it applies to ALL ethnic groups, not just whites. But whites tend to be the most likely to be supremacist and besides this is a white forum, or so it seems.

I do not even get the question. Why would I not be proud of who I am? Why would I not be proud of my ancestors and Europeans? Is not a fact that many did the amazing things they did in order that I, their future descendant, have a good life? Is that not what so many of us strive for?

You must not have children and you are either not white or a very confused and brainwashed white person. Why not be happy with who you are? Your parents and other ancestors went through a lot to bring you into the world and they made you... out of all the things they could have been doing you were important to them.

Only non-whites who are raised to feel as if they are a burden by their selfish and stupid parents or white people who have been brainwashed during their time in public schools to view themselves as a burden and just lucky to be born a privileged white would ask such a pointless question. I do not get the mindset of such a person who would ask the question or look at the world in such a way.

So you have genetic advantages and are the descendants of great people. You think because you have genes in you that makes you great?

I have a guitar at home that i've barely even played, does that make me great at it, of course not, but by your logic just because i have it i'm great at it. You are just like those teenagers that have an expensive camera and think they're good at photography. You can be proud of your family because you know them personally and helped them personally but say you're reading a newspaper and some Norwegian bodybuilder won a competition, it would be weird to say your proud of him wouldn't it?

Or going to a school play and say your proud of another persons child but you barely know them but their white. Inventors and physically peaked sports people can be proud of their heritage because they are putting what they have to good use. But you people getting pissed on the internet, no pride, no pride at all. You should be ashamed of yourself and your letting your ancestors down.

You did not earn your whiteness, so how can you justify being proud of it? It's about as irrational as nationalism and fundamentalism. You did not contribute to the achievements of past whites, so how can you claim you deserve to be associated with them? I honestly have yet to find a rational answer to this question.

Note that I think it applies to ALL ethnic groups, not just whites. But whites tend to be the most likely to be supremacist and besides this is a white forum, or so it seems.

This is a tired question, but I've just googled for antonyms of 'pride'. This was the result:

Make of that what you will. I do suspect though that your chosen user-name gives a clue to your resentment. I think you have an inferiority complex; you don't have to be a fatty, diet and get a feeling of self-esteem - pride- in your achievement. The other is not so easy to fix. But if it is possible for you to research your birth family, I think even you will find your self-worth when you discover your ancestors' struggles and achievements that resulted in you having life today. I hope so anyway; best wishes with your quest if you decide to take that breath-taking voyage of discovery into your past.